What Really Happened to Amelia Earhart?

It was a still and searing morning in Lae, in what is now Papua New Guinea, as Amelia Earhart taxied her Lockheed Electra onto the primitive 1,000-yard runway and pointed her nose at the Huon Gulf. Friday, July 2, 1937: one more in a long string of days and takeoffs during which almost 22,000 miles—nearly the circumference of the earth—had passed under her wings.

Fatigued from her punishing schedule and ill from a bout of dysentery in Bandung, she was now stabbing at Howland Island, two time zones and 2,556 miles from Lae, a speck in the unfathomable Pacific that, even if she and her navigator Fred Noonan were dead on course, could be completely obscured by a poorly timed cloud.

John Frost Newspapers; Bettmann/Getty Images

Steadying the Electra, Earhart roared down the runway, throwing dust. Five hundred feet, 600 feet, 700. With 50 yards to go, the Electra bounced hard over a small ridge and pitched out over the gulf, albatross-heavy, spitting ocean spray from her engines. Finally she began to climb, a smudge on the horizon, before passing out of sight.

"Miss Earhart Forced Down at Sea," the front page of the New York Times screamed the following day. "Search Pacific for Amelia," the Chicago Daily Tribune pleaded. But though the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard scoured the area for weeks, chasing down well over a hundred reported radio transmissions and covering some 250,000 square miles at an unheard-of expense of $4 million, they found nothing. Her body never recovered, her final chapter unknown, she has never died for us, or so it seems.

Amelia Earhart is always news. And, however improbably, given that 79 years have passed since her mystifying exit, new clues about that exit keep coming: promising sonar images in 2013 of a debris field, possibly unidentified wreckage in the reef off uninhabited Gardner Island (now know as Nikumaroro) in the Phoenix Islands, 356 nautical miles from Howland; new reports that surfaced in 2015 from descendants of an eyewitness claiming that he had seen an American woman with "short hair" and "long boots" and a man who were prisoners on a Japanese ship in the Marshall Islands, perhaps bound for Saipan; in 2007 the surfacing of journal entries made by a Florida woman in July 1937, when—at age 15—she fielded distress calls signed off by a "Mrs. Earhart Putnam" (Putnam was Earhart's married name).

The bulk of the evidence has been compiled by TIGHAR (the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery), which now says it may have solved the riddle of Earhart's vanishing. It's a bit of a story. Back in 1940, partial human remains were found on Gardner near the remnants of a campfire, along with an empty sextant box and pieces of a woman's shoe. Eventually a British medical examiner on Fiji determined that the bones belonged to a male of European descent, and interest subsided.

In 1997, however, documents including the medical examiner's report were rediscovered and, at TIGHAR's urging, scrutinized by forensic anthropologists, who decided that the recovered bones seemed "consistent with a female of Earhart's height and ethnic origin." Although the bones themselves unfortunately vanished long ago, the medical examiner's report was reevaluated in October 2016 by a forensic imaging specialist, with particular emphasis on the forearms; this research revealed that the measurements were not only consistent with a woman born in the later part of the 19th century, as Earhart was, but are probably a near perfect match for Amelia herself, judging by photographs.

Whether or not this hypothesis holds up to future scrutiny, the mystery of Earhart's disappearance seems an inadequate explanation for the way she has held our attention through the decades, and will most likely continue to. Her spirit permeates our culture unlike almost any other woman's in history—particularly in the present era, when our cultural lodestones crusade relentlessly to be liked and shared and followed in a quest to render irrelevant, even for the briefest moment, the question, Why should we care?

Her name and visage are as well known in our day as they were in her own. The suspension between the masculine and feminine, undeniable in every photo we have of Earhart, still reads fresh today. The tousled cropped hair and effortless, unstudied glamour. The loose-limbed stance in trousers, shoulders back, boyish and sexy without trying, without changing for or trying to please anyone.

But there's more. Her maverick attitude and unbending fearlessness, the way she flung herself at the sky—all that risk, all those lonely distances—just "for the fun of it." In 1997, Steve Jobs cast her in a "Think Different" ad for Apple among a select pantheon that included Albert Einstein, Muhammad Ali, John Lennon, Mahatma Gandhi, and Maria Callas ("misfits," "rebels," and "troublemakers" who "push the human race forward").

As a writer of historical fiction, I traffic in fascinating but little-known women, like Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway's first wife, or the aviator Beryl Markham. I divine their lives by following my own interest to the historical facts on record, and invent what can't be known. Private obsession is my principal engine. I never really considered Earhart as the subject for a novel precisely because she was too known.

But I couldn't stop thinking about her. What was it, exactly, that kept her flashing on the screen of our collective consciousness? I felt driven to search her out in biographies and letters, to discover her for myself, testing her life against her legend. I found out all sorts of things that surprised me. Her disappearance, in fact, might be the least interesting thing about her.

More famous in her lifetime than any other woman, Earhart came to that fame almost literally from nowhere. She was born in Atchison, Kansas, in 1897, to a lawyer father, Edwin, whose principal client was the railroad, and a well-bred mother, Amy. Her maternal grandparents, Amelia and Alfred Otis, lived on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River in a well-appointed and smoothly run household, with servants and cooks, gardens and a carriage house, books and more books, and music.

Those who knew Amelia in childhood recalled an adventurous tomboy, inclined to make toys out of packing boxes and sawhorses, eschewing dolls. At nine she liked to hunt rats with a .22 rifle, but she also had a sensitive, art-loving nature, an affinity for poetry, an avid, flexible imagination, and bottomless curiosity. Yet if these details wink at the legend in the making, there are many more that throw complicated shadows.

Amelia's father was a spotty provider, with more charisma than character and a weakness for drink. By seventh grade Amelia and her younger sister Muriel, or Pidge, had moved with their parents to Des Moines, where Edwin had taken a job with the Rock Island Railroad, chasing an easier life. He quickly became bored and disappointed in his work, and he took it out on his family, drinking more and becoming violent and verbally abusive at home. He may have suffered a nervous breakdown.

If these more Dickensian details of Earhart's early life come as a surprise, no doubt she would have wanted them to. Proud and reserved, Amelia would rather have swallowed a handful of tacks than divulge squalid family secrets. I can sympathize. My father too was a shiftless charmer who fought his own battles with addiction, and mostly lost, so I can more than guess at the tenor of uncertainty and chaos that latched the family to Edwin's slow-motion train wreck as he dragged his wife and daughters from Des Moines to St. Paul; St. Paul to Springfield, Missouri; Springfield to Chicago.

I understand something else about Earhart: how from a very young age she chose to focus on the future instead of the past, insisting on optimism, even (or especially) when hope seemed dubious. In a letter from St. Paul to an old Atchison friend, Earhart wrote, "Of course I'm going to Bryn Mawr if I have to drive a grocery wagon to accumulate the cash."

Earhart became practiced, as well, at masks and concealment, what her mother would later call "putting on an outside." But she also caught resilience, caught grit. Caught the tenacious strain of confidence that sometimes comes only with trauma. She could project herself past every dead end and disappointment, completely persuaded that she was headed somewhere extraordinary, no matter how erratic her path might look to others.

After high school Earhart drifted: Chicago to Philadelphia (where she went to a finishing school) to Toronto. She was a nurse's aide for soldiers wounded in World War I, she did charity work, took up the banjo. For a time she thought she might like medicine. Then, in 1920, when she was 23, Edwin, who had been separated from the family for years and was living alone in Los Angeles, made a last-gasp attempt to draw the family back together. Earhart moved west, and one day, after seeing a dazzling air show in Long Beach, she set out for a ratty airstrip off Wilshire Boulevard and paid $10 to be airborne for 10 minutes. Her response wasn't subtle. She was scarcely off the ground before she knew she had to fly.

Flight lessons were dear, so Earhart worked in the mailroom at the telephone company. Each weekend she rode a streetcar for an hour, to the end of the line, then walked another mile or more to reach Kinner Field on Long Beach Boulevard, which had one primitive hangar, a weedy runway, and a wind sock.

Her first teacher was Neta Snook, a short redhead in dirty coveralls who was only a year her senior but a seasoned pilot. Snook agreed to teach Earhart on credit in her dual-controlled Curtiss Canuck biplane, but she wasn't encouraged by her pupil's ability. No matter. Earhart had too much confidence, or perhaps it was a combination of hubris and love blindness. Soon she had scraped and borrowed enough to purchase a Kinner Airster biplane, which was smaller, trickier, and less stable than the Canuck—on which she had logged only about four hours of airtime during her first two months of flying. She called the Airster her Canary and cherished it like a pet.

In the meantime Amy and Edwin lost the last of their money in a gypsum mining scheme that went bust, and they eventually decided to divorce. Forced to sell the Canary, Earhart got involved in the trucking industry for a time, driving sand and gravel for the booming building trade. Not many women of her day (or ours) would have dreamed of such a thing—and Earhart didn't stick there, either. Traveling east in 1924, she struggled to support herself, teaching English in Harvard's extension program, working as a companion in a mental hospital, and finally landing at Denison House, one of Boston's oldest settlement houses, where she taught English to immigrants for $35 a week.

Earhart couldn't afford to take up flying instruction again with any seriousness, but she couldn't stay away from local hangars and airfields. Whenever possible, she piloted rented or borrowed planes for fundraising events, and her name began turning up in local newspapers. She was still a novice, but there were so few women in aviation at the time that just showing up was news. Earhart's visibility soon put her on a collision course with George Palmer Putnam, the man who would change her destiny.

Putnam, 39 and married, was part of a well-known publishing family that owned G.P. Putnam's Sons, which had been founded in 1838 in New York by his grandfather. Once a newspaperman, George had a keen sense of what was interesting to the general public, a gift that found purchase in a system he called "fabrication": coming up with a scheme for a book and then rooting around for someone to write it. Potboilers, sensationalism, lurid crime: Taste was not an obstacle for Putnam. He had his finger on the pulse of the popular, a diviner's sense of potential, and a knack for knowing what celebrity was and how to capitalize on it.

His biggest "get" so far had been Charles Lindbergh, whose 1927 book We became a huge best-seller, clocking 635,000 copies. Aviation was the adventure of the era, and though there was a substantial field of adventurous women eager to take on the Atlantic as Lindbergh had, none of them looked the part to Putnam—until a contact mentioned a young social worker he had read about.

Earhart agreed to meet Putnam in early May 1928, and she was more than he could have expected: boyish but feminine, poised but natural, warm but unrufflable. Her childhood had given her self-reliance in spades and an unconventionality that read, to Putnam, as freshness and pluck. And then there was the way she looked, with cropped wild blond curls and Lindbergh's eyes, strong chin, and intensity. Putnam's New York office wasn't exactly Schwab's drugstore, but Earhart—make no mistake—had been discovered.

During the next couple of months, plans for the Atlantic crossing moved forward with great secrecy. If another female candidate found a way to get across the ocean first, all the effort would come to nothing. Earhart saw the plane she would fly, dubbed Friendship, only once before heading to Trepassey, Newfoundland, with a crew to wait for the weather to cooperate. She took two weeks' leave from Denison House and wrote a letter to Pidge that said, "If I succeed all will be well. If I don't I shall be happy to pop off in the midst of such an adventure."

This chance would easily be the most exciting thing that had ever come Earhart's way, and it gave her direction, which she had been missing. But she was probably only marginally aware of what Putnam was grooming her for: to be as famous as Lindbergh, or even more. Whatever her expectations, from the moment the Friendship landed, on June 18, 1928, the whole world stood on tiptoe for "Lady Lindy," desperate to know all about her, from her tastes in clothes and makeup to how she'd "rather sit on the floor than on a chair."

It didn't seem to register that Earhart had been a passenger only, with no more control or responsibility than a Louis Vuitton trunk. She hadn't touched any of the controls; while she knew something about navigation, she had no experience with multiengine aircraft or flying on instruments. The North Atlantic was (and still is) notorious for sudden squalls and fog banks. Weather forecasting was primitive at best. In getting Earhart across the ocean, a pure publicity stunt, pilot Wilmer "Bill" Stultz and navigator Louis "Slim" Gordon were risking their lives. But they were beside the point.

The New York Times gave her most of the front page, with a lengthy headline that read, "Amelia Earhart Flies Atlantic," "First Woman to Do It Tells Her Own Story of Perilous 21-Hour Trip to Wales; Radio Quit and They Flew Blind Over Invisible Ocean."

When Earhart returned to the States, her job was to be Amelia Earhart. There were 200 fan letters a day to answer, a book to write, and countless invitations to speak at colleges, civic clubs, women's forums, chambers of commerce. Her itinerary was staggering—27 cities per month, with two or even three lectures a day—but Putnam handled everything.

Initially only her publisher, he quickly became her manager, her agent, her publicist, her adviser, her social secretary, and her stylist. "Your hats!" he wrote to Earhart after seeing a less than appealing photo of her in a newspaper. "They are a public menace. You should do something about them when you must wear them at all!" What she did was ditch them altogether, and so those tousled blond curls, natural and unrefined, became a part of her image.

Amy and Pidge found Putnam brusque and common—a charlatan—but he was a brilliant publicist. Leaping out in front of Earhart to sculpt public opinion, he made sure any mechanical mishaps, crashes, or forced landings (and there would be many in the coming years) weren't seen even for a moment as errors on Earhart's part.

As for the frequently aggrandizing inaccuracies in newspaper articles about her—that she held a degree from Columbia, had done graduate work at Harvard, was the first American woman to have been granted an FAI (Fédération Aéronautique Internationale) pilot's certificate, even that Stultz had been her co-pilot, not the Friendship's sole flier—they were let stand. She had to be seen as flawless and peerless, perfect.

A charlatan? Maybe. A rainmaker? Probably. But Earhart was rain. When she spoke in public, she won people over effortlessly with her enthusiasm, humor, and sincerity. "I know a great many boys who should be making pies—and a great many girls who would be better off in manual training," she told rapt Barnard coeds and housewives and Kiwanis Club members. "There is no reason why a woman can't hold any position in aviation, providing she can overcome prejudices and show ability."

I know a great many boys who should be making pies—and a great many girls who would be better off in manual training. —Amelia Earhart

She was naturally inspiring, because she believed every word she said, no matter how many times she said them. The flight was a stunt, but the woman was real and genuinely intriguing. And perhaps that has always been the secret sauce in the formula: PR only really works, and lasts, when there's something genuine to promote.

Something about Earhart captured the public's imagination and shimmered there accessibly, as if she stood for anyone—for us if we were given all the courage in the world, and time and wings to fling ourselves at the impossible.

She also had the ability to translate her particular breed of nerve for other people with uncommon charm, inviting them in. In an essay in the American Magazine about why she took risks in the air, she wrote:

"Have you ever longed to go to the North Pole? Or smell overripe apples in the sunshine? Or coast down a steep, snow-covered hill to an unknown valley? Or take a job behind a counter selling ribbons and show people how to sell ribbons as ribbons have never been sold before? Or take a friend by the arm and say, 'Forget it—I'm with you forever'? Or, just before a thunderstorm, to turn ten somersaults on the lawn?"

It's unlikely that Earhart had romantic feelings for Putnam at this point, though the two were inseparable. When his wife Dorothy divorced him, he immediately proposed to Earhart, but she turned him down. She said no four more times before she finally agreed. Work, not love, meant everything, but in Putnam she saw the possibility at least of an essential independence within the supportive structure of an alliance.

Still, Earhart had her doubts. On the morning of their wedding, in February 1931, she hand-delivered a letter to Putnam more candid than any other I have seen between lovers. Terrified of losing momentum in her work, she knew she had to keep some place where she could "go to be myself, now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinement of even an attractive cage."

She swore she wouldn't hold him to "any medieval code of faithfulness" and asked that he agree to let her go if they could "find no happiness together" within a year.

Earhart found marriage to Putnam far more agreeable than she originally expected, and though she did grow to love him, she was never in any sense a traditional wife. She continued to use her own name professionally (and "Mrs. Earhart Putnam" privately) and lived life as she chose, spending time with whomever she wished, even if rumors ensued.

Earhart seemed to take no notice of gossip, nor did she so much as glance at domestic life. There was too much to do. Even with Putnam's herculean efforts to keep her in the headlines, and to monetize her fame with endorsements of sportswear, pajamas, luggage, dress suits, and stationery, the lecture engagements were drying up.

She began working on a new book, later titled The Fun of It, and preparing in secret for a solo transatlantic flight that would justify, finally, her celebrity. The Lockheed Vega she had flown since 1929 and nicknamed her "little red bus" needed a complete reconditioning, and she would have to be trained to read weather charts and patterns, to study navigation, and to fly on instruments. But she needed to do it, to let the record show in her own mind that she was more than the façade of an American hero. That she had the stuff.

On May 20, 1932, five years to the day after Lindbergh set out in the Spirit of St. Louis and almost four years from the time she had been mere luggage in the Friendship, Earhart launched out on her own, and though there were many mishaps along the way, when she successfully made landfall in Northern Ireland, after 15 hours, she had flown 2,026 miles and become the second person in history to fly the Atlantic solo nonstop, the first woman, and the only person, male or female, to cross it twice.

Again, the whole world cheered. The lecture dates started up again with even more intensity—25 in 23 days—but even as she crisscrossed the country, she didn't stop plotting her next "first," and the one after that. If she were going to stay on top, Earhart couldn't even catch her breath.

On August 25, in the same year she flew the Atlantic solo, she set the women's transcontinental speed record, nonstop from Los Angeles to Newark. In January 1935 she became the first person to fly from Hawaii to California, the first person to solo anywhere in the Pacific, and the first person to solo over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

By 1937 there were only a handful of firsts left, and only one she cared about: flying around the world, and doing it the longest way, at the equator. She had to make sure no one did it before she did, and time wasn't on her side. She was nearly 40. "It is hard to be old," she said. "I'm afraid I'd hate it."

Of course, she never did grow old. She never aged a day after July 2, 1937, caught forever in a staggering last adventure that required superhuman endurance, consummate skill, and uncommon bravery. If she had once been merely a figurehead, the mascot for someone else's publicity stunt, she was bona fide now—and so far beyond that as to be unreachable by anyone's estimation.

In a letter to Putnam just before her world flight, she seemed bent on absolving him of any responsibility in case the worst should happen. "I want to do it because I want to do it," she wrote, words that move me inexpressibly. She might not have understood everything that drove her to launch herself at so much sky—but that didn't keep her from doing it anyway.

This July, 80 years will have passed since Amelia Earhart's disappearance, and it seems the riddle might be close to solved. And yet, despite TIGHAR's claims that the bones found back in 1940 on Gardner Island likely were Earhart's, other researchers with competing theories remain skeptical.

However riveting it might be to wait and see how this drama unfolds, I think it's a shame, somehow, that Earhart's disappearance has eclipsed and overshadowed her life, and continues to. Myth always leaves us hungry, without our knowing why.

I am far more struck by the beginning of her story, and even more by the unlikely middle—when she was nearly 30 and waiting to discover what she was for, what she would yet be and know. When she shrugged, no more lost than she had been for most of her life, and took yet another good-enough job, this time driving gravel and sand—marvelously, irresistibly blind to the way she would become, and then transcend, legend. Blind even to her next step. This Amelia makes sense to me, and I love her for it. It is a fitting place—a real place—to leave her.

This article originally appeared in the February 2017 issue of Town & Country.

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